Critical Discourse Analysis Of Political News Reports-Under The Framework Of Appraisal Theory

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is a new approach to discourse. It has made the study of language into an interdisciplinary tool and can be used by scholars with various backgrounds. Most significantly, it offers the opportunity to adopt a social perspective in the cross-cultural study of media texts.CDA emphasizes the asymmetric power between writer and reader. It advocates that meanings come about through interaction between readers and receivers and linguistic features come about as a result of social processes, which are never arbitrary. History must also be taken into account, as ideologically and politically "inflected time."In addition to language structure, ideology and power also play a essential role in CDA. It aims to uncover the implicit ideology through probing the mechanism of language. It has demonstrated that a discriminatory stance may be embedded in the form of subtle linguistic strategies. And it stresses the importance of social practice in analysis Since political news, as a subtype of mass media discourse, is of interestof CDA, it has been chosen as the analyzing data in critical discourse analysis. In addition, different political news definitely has different stances thus the comparison between news from two different newspapers has become necessary to explore different ideology.In CDA researches, systemic functional grammar (SFG) is regarded as an efficient instrument for investigating covert ideology and power in news reporting. With the appearance of the appraisal theory, some linguists call for the employment of the theory in CDA. Appraisal theory is the extension of SFG and it is concerned with the linguistic resources for by which a texts/speakers come to express, negotiate and naturalize particular inter-subjective and ultimately ideological positions. The theory is developed on the basis of SFG and absorbed the theory of Bakhtin. Within this broad scope, the theory is concerned more particularly with the language of evaluation, attitude and emotion. However, few researchers really explore the possibility of using appraisal theory in CDA. The paper tries to prove that the appraisal theory can be applied to the selected news samples in order to make critical discourse analysis richer. In addition, the paper aims to reveal the hidden ideology in the two different newspapers.Appraisal theory has three parts: Attitude, Engagement and Graduation so the thesis analyzes the four pairs of news on similar topics through the subtypes of Engagement (modality, in /direct speech andperson), Attitude and Graduation. The analysis and discussion section of the paper tentatively verify the assumption that appraisal theory can be a forceful tool of CDA in news and prove those aspects like modality, in/direct speech, person, attitude and graduation are most likely to hidden writer's stance and should be given enough attention by readers. Furthermore, the tools can be mastered by common readers.The thesis shows that readers can resist influences made by writers and obtain active position in the process of reading through appraisal theory. Besides, readers can use the proper forms of language and be sober-minded when facing with the complicated situations and so many confusing mass media.